Abstract
Tumor cells detached from primary tumor can invade vasculature and form circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Very few of CTCs could be arrested by capillaries. Subsequently, these cells extravasate into distant organs to seed new metastatic colonies. The prognostic significance of CTC numbers has been proved in many kinds of cancer. Even great efforts have been made in recent years to isolate CTCs from blood of patients, there are 36% of breast cancer patients with metastatic disease have undetectable CTCs. This may because that CTCs were not appeared at the sampling sites at the time of sampling. Therefore, understanding the distribution of CTCs may improve the detectable rate of it. In this work, we analyzed the temporal distribution of CTCs detected by in vivo flow cytometry (IVFC), which has been reported to be a powerful tool for monitoring CTCs continuously. We found CTCs were nonuniformly distributed in an orthotopic mouse model of human hepatocellular carcinoma, and we for the first time demonstrated that CTC intervals in late stages of cancer are exponential distribution and the number of CTCs occur within any time interval obeys Poisson distribution. Our study may give new insight into cancer metastasis process.
© 2017 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Quanyu Zhou and Xunbin Wei
W4B.3 International Conference on Photonics and Imaging in Biology and Medicine (PIBM) 2017
Xiaoling Wang and Xunbin Wei
AF3K.2 Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP) 2016
Amber L. Williams, Jessica Fitzgerald, and Mark Niedre
SM4D.3 Optical Tomography and Spectroscopy (OT&S) 2020